Please watch this before you read any further, I couldn't stop thinking about this while I was building:

"Remarkable!" -President Skroob

The Rorqual is a ship that people often forget about. Designed by Outer Ring Excavations, this ship is an industrial mothership. Every miner's dream, this enormous capital ship has many capabilities to support mining operations. Rorquals are the only way to compress raw minerals in the game. In order to turn rocks into slightly harder rocks, the ship must activate a siege module, which transforms the ship into a stationary vertical space sand compactor. Additionally, the ship provides long range asteroid field scanning, shield logistics, strong drone support, 3 bonused mining foreman fleet boosts, a ship maintenance array, a corporate ship hangar, an expansive ore cargohold, and a clone vat bay. The clone vat bay provides a means for players to jump to a new clone in the Rorqual, which usually is only possible to do between stations. And if all of that isn't enough, the Rorqual is a capital ship, which means it has a jump drive and can fit capital class modules like the capital shield booster or capital tractor beam.

In my experience in EVE, I have found the Rorqual to be very useful in wormholes. Wormholes spawn valuable mining sites, and the ore compression provided by the Rorqual cuts down on hauling trips, a huge plus when each trip can incur significant risk. My corporation's Rorqual never left the shields of our starbase, serving as a boosting platform and a stationary asteroid squisher. We affectionately named it "The Coffee Grinder". Outside of its traditional use, there exists the "Battle Rorqual". I have yet to be bored enough to try this myself, but Rorquals can actually be used to great effect in combat. Their massive HP and significant drone DPS combined with their ability to hotdrop (use their jump drive to jump directly on top of the target) can garner some hilarious kills on unsuspecting prey.

Video of the Rorqual transforming:

Here's what EVE Online has to say about the Rorqual:The Rorqual was conceived and designed by Outer Ring Excavations in response to a growing need for capital industry platforms with the ability to support and sustain large-scale mining operations in uninhabited areas of space.

To that end, the Rorqual's primary strength lies in its ability to grind raw ores into particles of smaller size than possible before, while still maintaining their distinctive molecular structure. This means the vessel is able to carry vast amounts of ore in compressed form.

Additionally, the Rorqual is able to fit a capital tractor beam unit, capable of pulling in cargo containers from far greater distances and at far greater speeds than smaller beams can. It also possesses a sizeable drone bay, jump drive capability and the capacity to fit a clone vat bay. This combination of elements makes the Rorqual the ideal nexus to build deep space mining operations around.

Due to its specialization towards industrial operations, its ship maintenance bay is able to accommodate only industrial ships, mining barges and their tech 2 variants

Obviously I have become addicted to recreating EVE ships in small scale. This ship posed an interesting challenge in that it has moving parts. I designed it mostly in one multi-hour sitting, and then spent a few more hours coloring it and making the animation of it transforming. I hope you are as pleased with this design as I am.

Splendid! The interpretation is spot on: shape and color are just like the real deal. The best I ever did was a pesky mining barge when it came to mining. No nullsec though, so never came across this beauty ingame. The transforming reference had me lolling, nice :)